The Argumentative Indian

19 years ago

Dialogue and Significance

The arguments are also, often enough, quite substantive. For example, the famous Bhagavad Gita, which is one small section of the Mahabharata, presents a tussle between two contrary moral positions – Krishna’s emphasis on doing one’s duty, on one side, and Arjuna’s focus on avoiding bad consequences (and generating good ones), on the other. The debate occurs on the eve of the great war that is a central event in the Mahabharata. Watching the two armies readying for war, profound doubts about the correctness of what they are doing are raised by Arjuna, the peerless and invincible warrior in the army of the just and honorable royal family (the Pandavas) who are about to fight the unjust usurpers (the Kauravas). Arjuna questions whether it is right to be concerned only with one’s duty to promote a just cause and be indifferent to the misery and the slaughter – even of one’s kin – that the war itself would undoubtedly cause. Krishna, a divine incarnation in the form of a human being (in fact, he is also Arjuna’s charioteer), argues against Arjuna. His response takes the form of articulating principles of action – based on the priority of doing one’s duty – which have been repeated again and again in Indian philosophy. Krishna insists on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of his evaluation of the consequences. It is a just cause, and, as a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, Arjuna cannot waver from his obligations, no matter what the consequences are.

Krishna’s hallowing of the demands of duty wins the argument, at least as seen in the religious perspective.

Indeed, Krishna’s conversations with Arjuna, the Bhagavad Gita, became a treatise of great theological importance in Hindu philosophy, focusing particularly on the “removal” of Arjuna’s doubts.
Krishna Menon’s record of the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations (nine hours non-stop), established half a century ago (when Menon was leading the Indian delegation), has not been equaled by anyone from anywhere.

The Bhagavad Gita was spectacularly praised in the early nineteenth century by Wilhelm von Humboldt as “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” In a poem in Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot summarizes Krishna’s view in the form of an admonishment: “And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward.” Eliot explains: “Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.’

And yet, as a debate in which there are two reasonable sides, the epic Mahabharata itself presents, sequentially, each of the two contrary arguments with much care and sympathy. Indeed, the tragic desolation that the post-combat and post-carnage land – largely the Indo-Gangetic plain – seems to face towards the end of the Mahabharata can even be seen as something of a vindication of Arjuna’s profound doubts. Arjuna’s contrary arguments are not really vanquished, no matter what the “message” of the Bhagavad Gita is meant to be. There remains a powerful case for “faring well,” and not just “forward.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the American team that developed the ultimate “weapon of mass destruction” during the Second World War, was moved to quote Krishna’s words (‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’) as he watched, on 16 July 1945, the awesome force of the first nuclear explosion devised by man.

Like the advice that Arjuna had received about his duty as a warrior fighting for a just cause, Oppenheimer the physicist could well find justification in his technical commitment to develop a bomb for what was clearly the right side. Scrutinizing – indeed criticizing – his own actions, Oppenheimer said later on: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.” How can good come from killing so many people? And why should I seek victory, kingdom or happiness for my own side?

The ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are frequently compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, are colossally longer than the works that the modest Homer could manage. Indeed, the Mahabharata alone is about seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together.

These arguments remain thoroughly relevant in the contemporary world. The case for doing what one sees as one’s duty must be strong, but how can we be indifferent to the consequences that may follow from our doing what we take to be our just duty? As we reflect on the manifest problems of our global world (from terrorism, wars and violence to epidemics, insecurity and grueling poverty), or on India’s special concerns (such as economic development, nuclear confrontation or regional peace), it is important to take on board Arjuna’s consequential analysis, in addition to considering Krishna’s arguments for doing one’s duty. The univocal “message of the Gita” requires supplementation by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahabharata, of which the Gita is only one small part.

Democracy as Public Reasoning

The Greek and Roman heritage on public discussion is, of course, rightly celebrated, but the importance attached to public deliberation also has a remarkable history in India. As it happens, even the world-conquering Alexander received some political lecturing as he roamed around north-west India in the fourth century BCE. For example, when Alexander asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were paying so little attention to the great conqueror, he got the following – broadly anti-imperial – reply (as reported by Arrian):

King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, traveling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! . . . You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.

In the history of public reasoning in India, considerable credit must be given to the early Indian Buddhists, who had a great commitment to discussion as a means of social progress. That commitment produced, among other results, some of the earliest open general meetings in the world. The so-called “Buddhist councils,” which aimed at settling disputes between different points of view, drew delegates from different places and from different schools of thought. The first of the four principal councils was held in Rajagriha shortly after Gautama Buddha’s death; the second about a century later in Vaisali; and the last occurred in Kashmir in the second century CE. But the third – the largest and the best known of these councils – occurred under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, in the then capital of India, Pataliputra (now called Patna). These councils were primarily concerned with resolving differences in religious principles and practices, but they evidently also addressed the demands of social and civic duties, and furthermore helped, in a general way, to consolidate and promote the tradition of open discussion on contentious issues.

As a debate in which there are two reasonable sides, the epic Mahabharata itself presents, sequentially, each of the two contrary arguments with much care and sympathy.

The association of Ashoka, who ruled over the bulk of the Indian subcontinent (stretching into what is now Afghanistan), with the largest of these councils is of particular interest, since he was strongly committed to making sure that public discussion could take place without animosity or violence. Ashoka tried to codify and propagate what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion – a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century “Robert’s Rules of Order.” He demanded, for example, “restraint in regard to speech, so that there should be no extolment of one’s own sect or disparagement of other sects on inappropriate occasions, and it should be moderate even on appropriate occasions.” Even when engaged in arguing, “other sects should be duly honoured in every way on all occasions.”

Ashoka’s championing of public discussion has had echoes in the later history of India, but none perhaps as strong as the Moghal Emperor Akbar’s sponsorship and support for dialogues between adherents of different faiths, nearly two thousand years later. Akbar’s overarching thesis that “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on tradition” is the way to address difficult problems of social harmony included a robust celebration of reasoned dialogues. A royal sponsorship is not essential for the practice of public reasoning, but it adds another dimension to the reach of the argumentative history of India. In the deliberative conception of democracy, the role of open discussion, with or without sponsorship by the state, has a clear relevance. While democracy must also demand much else, public reasoning, which is central to participatory governance, is an important part of a bigger picture.

Understanding Secularism

The long history of heterodoxy has a bearing not only on the development and survival of democracy in India, it has also richly contri-buted, I would argue, to the emergence of secularism in India, and even to the form that Indian secularism takes, which is not exactly the same as the way secularism is defined in parts of the West. The tolerance of religious diversity is implicitly reflected in India’s having served as a shared home – in the chronology of history – for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs, Baha’is and others. Each religious community managed to retain its identity within India’s multi-religious spectrum.

The toleration of diversity has also been explicitly defended by strong arguments in favour of the richness of variation, including fulsome praise of the need to interact with each other, in mutual respect, through dialogue.

Ashoka, as was mentioned earlier, wanted a general agreement on the need to conduct arguments with “restraint in regard to speech”: “a person must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage the beliefs of another without reason.” He went on to argue: “Depreciation should be for specific reasons only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.” Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: “For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.’
Akbar not only made unequivocal pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.”

While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideals, along with his insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions. Akbar’s own political decisions also reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his insistence on filling his court with non-Muslim intellectuals and artists (including the great Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remarkably, by his trusting a Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh), who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the general commander of his armed forces.

Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be.

Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.

The tolerance of variation in different walks of life has also had other – if less regal – support throughout Indian history, including in Sanskrit drama, with criticism and ridicule of narrow-minded persecution, for example in Sudraka’s Mricchakatikam (The Little Clay Cart) and Mudraraksasam (The Signet of the Minister). It finds expression also in Sanskrit poetry, with celebration of diversity, perhaps most elegantly expressed in Kalidasa’s Meghadutam (The Cloud Messenger), which applauds the beauty of varieties of human customs and behavior through the imagined eyes of a cloud that carries a message of longing from a banished husband to his beloved wife, as the cloud slowly journeys across fifth-century India. A similar commitment to accepting – and exalting – diversity can be seen in many other writings, from the prose and poetry of Amir Khusrau, a Muslim scholar and poet in the fourteenth century, to the rich culture of nonsectarian religious poetry which flourished from around that time, drawing on both Hindu (particularly Bhakti) and Muslim (particularly Sufi) traditions. Indeed, interreligious tolerance is a persistent theme in the poetry of Kabir, Dadu, Ravi-das, Sena and others, a circle that also included a number of distinguished women poets, such as the remarkable Mira Bai in the sixteenth century.

Secularism in contemporary India, which received legislative formulation in the post-independence constitution of the Indian Republic, contains strong influences of Indian intellectual history, including the championing of intellectual pluralism. Indian secularism takes a somewhat different form and makes rather different demands from the more austere Western versions, such as the French interpretation of secularism, which is supposed to prohibit even personal display of religious symbols or conventions in state institutions at work. Indeed, there are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities. Indian secularism has tended to emphasize neutrality in particular, rather than prohibition in general.

Skeptics, Agnostics and Atheists

It is indeed the case that India has a massive religious literature – perhaps more voluminous than any other country. However, these grand explorations of every possible religious belief coexist with deeply skeptical arguments that are also elaborately explored (sometimes within the religious texts themselves), going back all the way to the middle of the second millennium BCE. The so-called “song of creation” (or the “creation hymn,” as it is sometimes called) in the authoritative Vedas ends with the following radical doubts:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Ashoka tried to codify and propagate what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion – a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century “Robert’s Rules of Order.” He demanded, for example, “restraint in regard to speech, so that there should be no extolment of one’s own sect or disparagement of other sects on inappropriate occasions, and it should be moderate even on appropriate occasions.” Even when engaged in arguing, “other sects should be duly honored in every way on all occasions.”

Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.
These 3,500-year-old doubts would recur in Indian critical debates again and again. Indeed, Sanskrit not only has a bigger body of religious literature than exists in any other classical language, it also has a larger volume of agnostic or atheistic writings than in any other classical language. There are a great many discussions and compositions of different kinds, conforming to the loquaciousness of the argumentative tradition.

Indian texts include elaborate religious expositions and protracted defense. They also contain lengthy and sustained debates among different religious schools. But there are, in addition, a great many controversies between defenders of religiosity on one side, and advocates of general skepticism on the other. The doubts sometimes take the form of agnosticism, sometimes that of atheism, but there is also Gautama Buddha’s special strategy of combining his theoretical skepticism about God with a practical subversion of the significance of the question by making the choice of good behavior completely independent of any God – real or imagined. Indeed, different forms of godlessness have had a strong following throughout Indian history, as they do today.

The “Lokayata” philosophy of skepticism and materialism flourished from the first millennium BCE, possibly even in Buddha’s own time (judging from some references in the early Buddhist literature), some two and a half millennia ago. There is even some evidence of the influence of that line of thinking in the Upanisads. Atheism and materialism continued to attract adherents and advocates over many centuries, and were increasingly associated with the exposition of the intellectually combative Carvaka. That “undercurrent of Indian thought,” as D. N. Jha has described it, finds later expression in other texts, for example in the “materialist philosophical text . . . Tattopalavasimha written by a certain Jayarishi in the eighth century.” In the fourteenth century when Madhava Acarya (himself a Vedantist Hindu) wrote his authoritative “Collection of All Philosophies” (Sarvadarsanasamgraha), the “Carvaka system” had the distinction of receiving an elaborately sympathetic defense in the first chapter of the compilation, consisting of a reasoned defense of atheism and materialism. After being expounded and defended in the first chapter, the atheistic claims are subjected to counterarguments in the following chapter, in line with the dialectical strategy of the book, in which each chapter defends a particular school of thought, followed by counterarguments in later chapters.

The active presence of atheism and materialism continued through the regimes of Muslim kings. Indeed, even in the late sixteenth century, when the Moghal emperor Akbar held his multi-religious dialogic encounters in Agra, the Carvaka school of atheism was well represented among the alternative positions that were selected for presentation (as Akbar’s adviser and chronicler Abul Fazl noted). In philosophical discourses throughout Indian history, atheists and skeptics make frequent appearances, and even though, in many cases, their points of view are ultimately rejected, they do get their say.
An adequately inclusive understanding of Indian heterodoxy is particularly important for appreciating the reach and range of heterodoxy in the country’s intellectual background and diverse history. This is especially critical because of the relative neglect of the rationalist parts of the Indian heritage in the contemporary accounts of India’s past, in favor of concentrating on India’s impressive religiosity. That selective inattention has, in fact, produced a substantial bias in the interpretation of Indian thought, and through that in the understanding of the intellectual heritage of contemporary India.

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.

The exaggerated focus on religiosity has also contributed to an underestimation of the reach of public reasoning in India and the diversity of its coverage. For example, Kautilya’s classic treatise on political economy and governance, Arthasastra (translatable as “Economics’), initially composed in the fourth century BCE, is basically a secular treatise, despite the respectful gestures it makes to religious and social customs.

Science, Epistemology and Heterodoxy

It is not hard to see that the possibility of scientific advance is closely connected with the role of heterodoxy, since new ideas and discoveries have to emerge initially as heterodox views, which differ from, and may be in conflict with, established understanding. The history of scientific contributions across the world – the experiences of Copernicus, or Galileo, or Newton, or Darwin – shows many examples of the part that resolute heterodoxy has to play, in scrutinizing, and when necessary rejecting, the views that are standardly accepted. We can argue that the flowering of Indian science and mathematics that began in the Gupta period (led particularly by Aryabhata in the fifth century CE, Varahamihira in the sixth, and Brahmagupta in the seventh) benefited from the tradition of scepticism and questioning which had been flourishing in India at that time. There are also methodological departures in this period in epistemology and in investigating the ways and means of advancing the knowledge of the phenomenal world.

In the Ramayana, Javali, a skeptical pundit, lectures Rama, the hero of the epic, on how he should behave, but in the process supplements his religious skepticism by an insistence that we must rely only on what we can observe and experience. His denunciation of religious practices (‘the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the sastras [scriptures] by clever people, just to rule over [other] people’) and his debunking of religious beliefs (“there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that”) are fortified by the firm epistemological advice that Javali gives Rama: “Follow what is within your experience and do not trouble yourself with what lies beyond the province of human experience.”

This observational focus is, of course, in line with the materialism of Lokayata and the Carvaka system. If the Lokayata approach comes through as being intensely argumentative and very dedicated to raising methodological doubts (going well beyond merely disputing the basis of religious knowledge), that is probably a just conclusion. Indeed, Buddhaghosa, a Buddhist philosopher in fifth-century India, thought that even though Lokayata can be literally interpreted as the discipline that bases knowledge only on “the material world,” it could perhaps be better described as the “discipline of arguments and disputes.” In this respect, the rationale of the Lokayata approach is quite close to a methodological point that Francis Bacon would make with compelling clarity in 1605 in his treatise The Advancement of Learning. “The registering and proposing of doubts has a double use,” Bacon said. One use is straightforward: it guards us “against errors.” The second use, Bacon argued, involved the role of doubts in initiating and furthering a process of enquiry, which has the effect of enriching our investigations. Issues that “would have been passed by lightly without intervention,” Bacon noted, end up being “attentively and carefully observed” precisely because of the “intervention of doubts.”
If epistemological departures from orthodoxy provided methodological help for the cultivation of observational science, so did a catholicity of approach that allowed Indian mathematicians and scientists to learn about the works in these fields in Babylon, Greece and Rome, which were extensively used in Indian astronomy (particularly in the Siddhantas) which preceded the flowering of Indian science and mathematics from the fifth century CE onwards.

If the Lokayata approach comes through as being intensely argumentative and very dedicated to raising methodological doubts (going well beyond merely disputing the basis of religious knowledge), that is probably a just conclusion. Indeed, Buddhaghosa, a Buddhist philosopher in fifth-century India, thought that even though Lokayata can be literally interpreted as the discipline that bases knowledge only on “the material world,” it could perhaps be better described as the “discipline of arguments and disputes.”

As it happens, a great many departures in science and mathematics occurred in India from the early centuries of the first millennium, which altered the state of knowledge in the world. The interactive openness of Indian work involved both give and take. Indian trigonometry and astronomy, in particular, are of special interest both because of their historical importance and because of the way in which they influenced India’s relations with other civilizations, particularly the Arab world and China.
In fact, Indian mathematics and astronomy had a particularly profound impact on Arab work (including Iranian work in Arabic) to both of which Arabs and Iranians gave generous acknowledgement. This applied to foundational departures in mathematics (particularly in the development and use of the decimal system and in trigonometry) and also to new ideas and measurements in astronomy. Indeed, the departures presented in Aryabhata’s pioneering book, completed in 499 CE, not only generated extensive responses within India (starting with the works of Varahamihira, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara), but they were also much discussed in their Arabic translations.

The Importance of Arguments

Heterodoxy has been championed in many different ways throughout Indian history, and the argumentative tradition remains very much alive today. This tradition has received understanding and support from many of the modern leaders of India – not only political leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi, but also people in other walks of life, such as Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore, who was proud of the fact that his family background reflected “a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British,” emphasized the need to be vigilant in defense of this open-minded tradition and to help it to flower more fully.

Like Akbar’s championing of rahi aql (the path of reason), Tagore emphasized the role of deliberation and reasoning as the foundation of a good society:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; . . .

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; . . .
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

That task, momentous as it is, is made easier, I have argued, by the long history and consummate strength of our argumentative tradition, which we have reason to celebrate and to defend.
I end on a positive (if somewhat light-hearted) note, by recollecting a nineteenth-century Bengali poem by Ram Mohun Roy that bears on the subject matter of this essay. Roy explains what is really dreadful about death:

Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be.
Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.
We are told, in line with our loquacious culture, that the real hardship of death consists of the frustrating – very frustrating – inability to argue. There is, actually, an interesting vision behind this extraordinary diagnosis.